He’d completed his driver’s education classes, practiced for hours with his father whenever they had time, and aced his written test (of course he did). Now he has his permit. Now he can go anywhere he wants without needing his parents to agree to take him.

He knows just what he wants to do with it first.

Cooper tucks the permit into his back pocket and goes to find his mother. She’s in the parlor, tucked comfortably into one of the overstuffed, wingback chairs, reading a book. She looks so tiny there.

“Mom?” He leans tentatively into the room. “Can I take Blaine somewhere?”

His mother sets the book down on her lap and looks up at him. “Where?”

“Columbus.” It’s half an hour from Westerville to Columbus, and it’s all freeway. Cooper’s done enough freeway driving, in the class and with his father, to not feel worried about. Not much anyway.

“Why do you want to go out to Columbus?”

Cooper licks his lips. “There’s something I want to get for Blaine. I think he’d really like it. I want him to come with me.”

Mrs. Anderson levels her eldest son a long and serious look. “He’s too young,” she says finally. “You’re too young.”

“Please? I watch him all the time. Let me take him, please? I have something really special in mind.” Please let me do this for him when you wouldn’t he thinks.

“All right. But I expect you back before dark.”

“Of course.” Cooper crosses the room and presses a quick kiss to his mother’s cheek. She smells of lilacs and tea. “Thank you.”

“Be careful with him,” his mother says as he’s leaving the parlor.

“I always am.”

***

Cooper finds Blaine in his bedroom. He’s standing on his bed, holding an advance-lunge pose, practice foil in hand. The point of the foil is pressed to his headboard and he has a bright look of triumph on his face.

“Well done, good sir,” Cooper says, clapping lightly, and Blaine jumps in surprise, almost tripping over his bedsheets.

“I’m getting better Coop!” He announces proudly, jumping up and down a little even though he knows he’s not supposed to.

“I’m going to have to challenge you to a duel then.”

Blaine grins and brandishes the practice foil at him in a way that might have been threatening if he wasn’t seven and wearing a pillowcase as a cape.

“I accept your challenge,” Blaine says with a roguish lilt to his voice Cooper knows he learned from all those Errol Flynn movies they’ve been watching.

Cooper sketches a quick bow at Blaine, who returns it. “Another time, B. I want to take you somewhere today.”

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise. Take off your cape and grab some shoes. We’re going out, Blainers, just you and me, kid.”

Blaine whoops, jumping off the bed with a flurry of limbs and discarded pillowcase cape, and the smile on his face is all crinkled eyes and missing teeth.

***

The Build-A-Bear Workshop at the Easton Town Center is everything that Cooper imagined.

It’s huge and bright, all primary colors and exaggerated angles, loud with the excited squeals and chattering of kids and their parents.

“Do you remember?” Cooper asks, as he and Blaine walk into the store, Blaine’s little hand clasped firmly in his own.

“We were here a little while ago? And you wanted to make a bear, but we didn’t have time.” Our parents didn’t have time Cooper doesn’t tell him.

Blaine’s eyes are huge and almost green in the florescent lighting of the workshop. “I get to make my own bear?” He asks with a child’s easy wonder. Cooper forgets sometimes, with how mature Blaine is for his age (pillowcase cape notwithstanding) that his brother is still a little kid and he gets excited about all those things that enrapture little kids.

“You get to make your own anything you want. They have puppies and kittens and monkeys and turtles. Anything. What about a kitten? You like kittens.”

“No. I want a bear,” Blaine announces resolutely, setting his jaw. “We should both have bears. So the bears can be brothers too.”

Cooper’s heart clenches in his chest, but it’s a good kind of pain. He squeezes Blaine’s hand a little tighter.

“Brother bears it is.”

They spend the next half-hour putting their bears together. Cooper is a little weirded out when he has to stuff a satin heart into the empty shell of the bear, but Blaine seems to love it. He spends a full minute carefully arranging the heart, making sure it sits just right.

They both laugh when the staff takes their bears for a “bath” in an airstream.

“But there’s no water,” Blaine whispers to Cooper, tugging a little on his sleeve. Cooper just grins and shrugs at him. He doesn’t get it either.

Cooper dresses his bear in dark pants, a button-down shirt, and a bright pink bowtie. He would give it bushier eyebrows if it were an option.

Blaine puts his bear in a pair of jeans and an Ohio State University t-shirt. (Cooper isn’t going to tell him that he’s not staying in Ohio for college. Now’s not the time.) Blaine shoves a pair of sunglasses on top of the bear’s head to complete the look.

“What are you going to name yours?” Cooper asks when they’re done and getting birth certificates printed out.

“Coop, of course,” Blaine states, as if there were no other option.

“Then I’m naming my Blainers.”

Blaine crinkles his nose up at him, but he’s clutching his newly named Coop-bear to his chest. “Fine.”

Cooper pays for the bears with his allowance money. They really are overpriced, but he doesn’t have much that he buys from himself. And his parents really do give him too much for a weekly allowance. Not that he’s going to complain about it.

“Do you want to get some ice cream before we go home?”

Blaine has his bear still clutched to his chest. He looks up at Cooper. “But mom and dad don’t like it when we have ice cream before dinner.”

“Yeah but they aren’t here, are they?” Cooper winks at him conspiratorially.

Blaine grins up at him and Cooper stifles a laugh at the gaps in his smile, where the baby teeth have fallen out and the adult teeth haven’t quite come in. “We won’t tell them.”

“Not a word.” Cooper holds out his free hand and Blaine takes it. He doesn’t care that he’s about to walk through the Easton Town Center carrying a teddy bear wearing a bowtie under one arm. He’ll do anything to keep that open, contented look on his little brother’s face.

***

Years later, Kurt Hummel is exploring Blaine Anderson’s bedroom in Cooper’s house in Lima. Blaine is curled up on his bed, watching Kurt as he makes a slow circuit around his room. Touching this. Picking up that. It feels good to have Kurt comfortable in his room.

“Blaine?” Kurt asks suddenly, standing in front of Blaine’s closet.

“Yeah?”

“What’s this?” He turns around and he’s holding a teddy bear. It’s wearing an Ohio State University shirt. Blaine grins.

“Come over here. Let me tell you a little story.”